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> quite rationally and of their own free will

Is this the magic phrase that means "free market" to you? Because the word "free" is in it?

We could say that the USSR, quite rationally and of its own free will, sent millions to the gulags and forced labor camps to create widgets. Cute, right? Hey, they did it quite rationally (after all, the labor is way cheaper when you're using prison camps) and of their own free will, therefore it's the free market!

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We can't say the prisoners chose to enter the gulags of their own free will, though. Since freedom of contract requires all parties to enter into the agreement consentually, that means that the market for gulag laborers is not free.

The US governent does create incentives which change the optimal behavior of rational actors in the health insurance market, but those actors still have very broad latitude to respond to those incentives as they see fit. That's not perfect economic freedom, but it's a lot closer to it than the systems most other countries use. It also gets noticeably worse results on a broad variety of metrics than the systems most other countries use. Make of that what you will.

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